I poured Arquímedes a glass of the foaming beer that the black woman in rollers had just brought, and I poured another for myself. Cuba, married in Paris: no doubt about it. Who else could it be? Now I started to tremble. I felt uneasy, as if some terrible revelation would emerge at any moment. I said, “Cheers, Arquímedes,” and we both took a long drink. From where I was sitting I could see one of the old man’s sneakers, full of holes, and a bony ankle, scabbed or dirty, where an ant was crawling that he didn’t seem to feel. Was a coincidence like this possible? Yes, it was. I had no doubt about that now.
“I think I met her once,” I said, pretending I was talking just to make conversation and had no personal interest. “Your daughter was on a scholarship to Cuba for a while, wasn’t she? And then she married a French diplomat, right? A gentleman named Arnoux, if I’m not mistaken.”
“I don’t know if he was a diplomat or what, she never even sent a photograph,” Arquímedes grumbled, brushing his nose. “But he was an important Frenchy and he earned good money, that’s what they said. In a case like that, doesn’t a daughter have obligations to her family? Especially if her family is poor and suffering hardships.”
He took another sip of beer and was lost in thought for a long time. Some chicha-fueled music, off-key and monotonous, sung by Los Shapis, replaced the salsa. At the table to the side, the electricians were talking about Sunday’s horse races and one of them swore: “Cleopatra’s a sure thing in the third.” Suddenly, remembering something, Arquímedes raised his head and stared at me with feverish eyes.
“You knew her?”
“I think so, vaguely.”
“That guy, the Frenchy, he had a lot of money, didn’t he?”
“I don’t know. If we’re talking about the same person, he was a functionary at UNESCO. A good position, no doubt about it. Your daughter, the times I saw her, was always very well dressed. She was a good-looking, elegant woman.”
“Otilita always dreamed about what she didn’t have, ever since she was little,” Arquímedes said suddenly, sweetening his voice and breaking into an unexpected smile full of indulgence. “She was very lively, at school she won prizes. And she had delusions of grandeur from the day she was born. She was never resigned to her fate.”
I couldn’t control my laughter, and the old man looked at me, disconcerted. Lily the Chilean girl, Comrade Arlette, Madame Robert Arnoux, Mrs. Richardson, Kuriko, and Madame Ricardo Somocurcio was, in reality, named Otilia. Otilita. How funny.
“I never would have imagined her name was Otilia,” I explained. “I met her under another name, her husband’s, Madame Robert Arnoux. That’s what they do in France, when a woman marries she takes her husband’s first and last names.”
“People’s ways are funny,” remarked Arquímedes, smiling and shrugging. “Has it been a long time since you saw her?”
“A long time, yes. I don’t even know if she still lives in Paris. If she’s the same person, obviously. The Peruvian girl I’m telling you about had been in Cuba and got married there, in Havana, to a French diplomat. Then he took her to live in Paris, in the 1960s. That’s where we saw each other the last time, it must be four or five years ago. I remember she talked a lot about Miraflores, she said she spent her childhood in that neighborhood.”
The old man nodded. In his watery eyes, nostalgia had displaced fury. He held up the glass of beer and blew at the foam around the edge, slowly, evening it out.
“That’s her,” he declared, nodding several times as he brushed his nose. “Otilita lived in Miraflores when she was little because her mother worked as a cook for a family who lived there. The Arenas family.”
“On Calle Esperanza?” I asked.
The old man nodded, staring at me in surprise. “You know that too? How come you know so many things about Otilita?”
I thought, How would he react if I said: Because she’s my wife?
“Well, as I said. Your daughter always remembered Miraflores and the little house on Calle Esperanza. It’s a neighborhood where I lived as a boy too.”
Behind the counter, the black woman in rollers was following the dislocated beat of Los Shapis, moving her head from side to side. Arquímedes took a long drink and was left with a ring of foam around his sunken lips.
“Since she was this high, Otilita felt ashamed of us,” he said, frowning again. “She wanted to be like the whites, the rich people. She was a smart-alecky kid, very crafty. Pretty smart, but always taking risks. Not everybody can move to another country without a cent, like she did. Once she won a contest, on Radio América. Imitating Mexicans, Chileans, Argentines. I don’t think she could have been more than nine or ten years old. They gave her a pair of skates for a prize. She conquered the family where her mother worked as a cook. The Arenas family. She won them over, I tell you. They treated her like a member of the family. They let her be friends with their own daughter. They spoiled her. After that she was even more ashamed of being the daughter of her own mother and father. I mean, from the time she was little you could see how she’d turn her back on her family when she was grown.”
Suddenly, at this point in the conversation, I began to feel a little sick. What was I doing here, sticking my nose into these sordid, intimate details? What else did you want to know, Ricardito? What for? I began to look for an excuse to say goodbye, because without warning the Chim Pum Callao had turned into a prison cell. Arquímedes went on talking about his family. Everything he said made me sadder and more depressed. Apparently he had a slew of children, by three different women, “all of them recognized.” Otilita was the oldest daughter of his first wife, now deceased. “Feeding twelve mouths can kill you,” he repeated with a resigned expression. “It wore me out. I don’t know how I still have the strength to earn my bread, caballero.” In fact, he did look exhausted and frail. Only his eyes, lively and strong, showed a will to go on; the rest of his body seemed defeated and fearful.
It must have been two hours at least since we came into the Chim Pum Callao. All the tables were empty except ours. The owner turned off the radio, suggesting it was time to close, I asked for the check, paid it, and when we walked out, I asked Arquímedes to accept a gift of a hundred-dollar bill.
“If you ever run into Otilita again over there in Paris, tell her to remember her father and not be such a bad daughter, or in the next world they might punish her.” The old man extended his hand.
He stood looking at the hundred-dollar bill as if it had fallen from the sky. He was so moved, I thought he was going to cry. He stammered, “A hundred dollars! God bless you, caballero.” I thought, What if I told him: You’re my father-in-law, Arquímedes, can you believe it?
I waited for a while on Plaza José Gálvez, and when a dilapidated taxi finally appeared and I signaled it to stop, a swarm of ragged children surrounded me, hands outstretched, asking for money. I told the driver to take me to Calle Esperanza, in Miraflores.
On the long ride in the clattering jalopy that was belching smoke, I regretted having instigated the conversation with Arquímedes. I felt sad down to the marrow of my bones when I thought about what Otilita’s childhood must have been like in one of those Callao shantytowns. Knowing it was impossible for me to approach a reality so remote from the Miraflores life I had been lucky enough to experience, I imagined her as a little girl, in the crowding and grime of the hovels thrown up somehow on the banks of the Rímac—as we drove past them, the taxi filled with flies—where dwellings were intermingled with pyramids of garbage accumulating there for who knows how long, and I imagined each day’s want, precariousness, insecurity, until, providential gift, the mother obtained a job as cook for a middle-class family in a residential neighborhood and managed to bring along her oldest daughter. I imagined the artfulness, the flattery, the charm used by Otilita, the girl endowed with an exceptionally well-developed instinct for survival and adaptation, until she had won over the lady and gentleman of the house. First they would have laughed at her, then been pleased by how vivacio
us the cook’s little girl was. They would have given her the shoes and dresses that the real daughter of the house, Lucy, the other Chilean girl, had outgrown. This was how Arquímedes’ little daughter had climbed up, achieving a place in the Arenas family. Until, finally, she won the right to play and go out as an equal, a friend, a sister, with the daughter of the house, though Lucy attended a private academy and she went to a state school. Now, after thirty years, it was clear why Lily, the Chilean girl of my childhood, didn’t want to have a boyfriend and didn’t invite anyone to her house on Calle Esperanza. And, above all, it was exceedingly clear why she had decided to stage that performance, to de-Peruvianize herself, to transubstantiate into a Chilean girl so she would be accepted in Miraflores. I felt moved to tears. I was mad with impatience to hold my wife in my arms, I wanted to caress her, stroke her, beg her pardon for the childhood she’d had, tickle her, tell her jokes, play the clown to hear her laugh, promise her that she never would suffer again.
Calle Esperanza hadn’t changed very much. I walked up and down twice, back and forth from Avenida Larco to Zanjón. The Minerva Bookstore was still on the corner across from Parque Central, though the Italian woman with white hair, the widow of José Carlos Mariátegui, always so serious as she stood behind the counter and waited on customers, was not there now. Gambrinus, the German restaurant, no longer existed, and neither did the ribbon and button shop where I sometimes went with Aunt Alberta. But the three-story building where the Chilean girls lived was still there. Narrow, squeezed between a house and another building, faded, with little balconies that had wooden railings, it looked very poor and old-fashioned. In the apartment with its dark, narrow rooms, in the tiny hole of a maid’s room where her mother would lay a pallet on the floor for her every night, Otilita would have been infinitely less unfortunate than in Arquímedes’ house. And, perhaps, right here, when she was still very young, she already had made the rash decision to move forward and do whatever she had to do to no longer be Otilita, daughter of the cook and the builder of breakwaters, to flee forever the trap, the prison, the curse that Peru meant for her, and go far away and become rich—that above all: rich, very rich—though to accomplish this she would have to engage in the worst escapades, run the most awful risks, do anything at all until she became a cold, unloving, calculating, and cruel woman. She achieved this only for short periods of time and paid dearly for it, leaving pieces of her skin and her soul along the way. When I thought of her in the worst moments of her crises, sitting on the toilet, trembling with fear, clutching my hand, I had to make a great effort not to cry. Of course you were right, bad girl, to refuse to return to Peru, to despise the country that reminded you of all you had accepted, suffered, and done to escape. You did very well not to come with me on this trip, my love.
I took a long walk on the streets of Miraflores, following the itineraries of my youth: Parque Central, Avenida Larco, Parque Salazar, the seawalls. My chest was tight with the urgent need to see her, hear her voice. Naturally, I never would tell her I met her father. Naturally, I would never confess I knew her real name. Otilia, Otilita, how funny, it didn’t suit her at all. Naturally, I would forget about Arquímedes and everything I had heard this morning.
When I reached his house, Uncle Ataúlfo was already in bed. Anastasia, the old servant, had left my supper on the table, under a napkin to keep it warm. I ate no more than a mouthful, and as soon as I got up from the table, I went into the living room and closed the door. I was sorry to make an international call, because I knew Uncle Ataúlfo wouldn’t allow me to pay for it, but I had such a great need to talk to the bad girl, hear her voice, tell her I missed her, that I decided to do it. Sitting in the armchair in the corner where Uncle Ataúlfo read his papers, next to the telephone table, with the room in darkness, I called her. The phone rang several times and nobody answered. The time difference, of course! It was four in the morning in Paris. But precisely for that reason, it was impossible for the Chilean girl—Otilia, Otilita, how funny—not to hear the phone. It was on the night table, next to her ear. And she slept very lightly. The only explanation was that Martine had sent her on one of those business trips. I went up to my room, dragging my feet, frustrated and dejected. Naturally, I couldn’t close my eyes because each time I felt sleep coming on I awoke, startled and lucid, and saw the face of Arquímedes sketched in the darkness, looking at me mockingly and repeating the name of his oldest daughter: Otilita, Otilia. Was it possible? No, a stupid idea, an attack of jealousy, ridiculous in a fifty-year-old man. Another little game to keep you worried, Ricardito? Impossible. How could she have suspected that you would phone her now, at this time of night? The logical explanation was that she wasn’t home because she had gone on business to Biarritz, Nice, Cannes, any of the beach resorts where they hold conventions, conferences, meetings, weddings, and other pretexts the French find for drinking and eating like gluttons.
I continued calling for the next three days, and she never answered the phone. Consumed by jealousy, I didn’t see anything or anybody else; all I did was count the eternal days left until I could take the plane back to Europe. Uncle Ataúlfo noticed my nervous state, though I made exaggerated efforts to seem normal, and perhaps that was precisely the reason. He limited himself to asking me two or three times if I felt all right, because I hardly ate and turned down an invitation from the amiable Alberto Lamiel to go out to eat and then visit an unpretentious club to hear my favorite singer, Cecilia Barraza.
On the fourth day I left for Paris. Uncle Ataúlfo wrote to the bad girl in his own hand, apologizing for stealing her husband for the past two weeks but, he added, this visit by his nephew had been miraculous, helping him through a difficult time and assuring him a long life. I didn’t sleep, I didn’t eat for the nearly eighteen hours of the flight because of a very long layover of the Air France plane in Pointe-à-Pitre, to repair something that had broken down. What would be waiting for me this time when I opened the door of my apartment in École Militaire? Another note from the bad girl, telling me, with the coldness of the old days, that she had decided to leave because she was sick of the boring life of a petit bourgeois housewife, tired of preparing breakfasts and making beds? Could she go on with those tricks at her age?
No. When I opened the door to the apartment on Rue Joseph Granier—my hand was trembling and I couldn’t fit the key into the lock—there she was, waiting for me. She opened her arms to me with a big smile.
“At last! I was getting tired of being alone and abandoned.”
She looked as if she were going to a party, wearing a very low-cut dress that bared her shoulders. When I asked her why all the finery, she said, nibbling at my lips, “Because of you, idiot, what else? I’ve been waiting for you since early this morning, calling Air France over and over again. They said the plane had been delayed in Guadeloupe for several hours. Come on, let me see how they treated you in Lima. You’re grayer, I think. From missing me so much, I suppose.”
She seemed happy to see me, and I felt relieved and ashamed. She asked if I wanted anything to drink or to eat, and since she saw me yawning, she pushed me toward the bedroom. “Go on, get some sleep, I’ll take care of your suitcase.” I took off my shoes, trousers, and shirt, and pretending to sleep, I watched her through half-closed eyes. She unpacked slowly, in a very orderly way, concentrating on what she was doing. She separated the dirty clothes and put them in a bag she would take to the laundry afterward. The clean things she carefully arranged in the closet. Socks, handkerchiefs, suit, tie. Once in a while she would glance at the bed, and I thought her expression grew calmer when she saw me there. She was forty-eight years old, and no one seeing her model’s figure would believe it. She looked very attractive in the light green dress that left her shoulders and part of her back bare, and with her face so beautifully made-up. She moved slowly, gracefully. Once I saw her approach—I closed my eyes completely and partially opened my mouth, pretending to sleep—and I felt her cover me with the quilt. Could it all be a farce? A
bsolutely not. But why not, at any moment life with her could turn into theater, into fiction. Should I ask why she hadn’t answered the phone these past few days? Try to find out if she had been on a business trip? Or would it be better to forget all about it and sink into this tender lie of domestic happiness? I felt an infinite weariness. Later, when I was beginning to really fall asleep, I felt her lie down beside me. “What an idiot, I woke you.” She turned toward me and with one hand rumpled my hair. “You have more and more gray hair, old man,” she said with a laugh. She had taken off her dress and shoes, and the slip she wore was a light matte color, similar to her skin.
“I missed you,” she said unexpectedly, becoming very serious. She fixed her honey-colored eyes on mine in a way that suddenly reminded me of the stare of the builder of breakwaters. “At night I couldn’t sleep, thinking about you. I masturbated almost every night, imagining you were making me come with your mouth. One night I cried, thinking something might happen to you, a sickness, an accident. That you would call to say you had decided to stay in Lima with some Peruvian and I’d never see you again.”
Our bodies didn’t touch. She kept her hand on my head, but now she passed the tips of her fingers over my eyebrows, my mouth, as if to verify I was really there. Her eyes were still very serious. In their depths was a watery gleam, as if she were holding back a desire to cry.
“Once, so many years ago, in this very room, you asked me what I thought happiness was, do you remember, good boy? And I said it was money, finding a man who was powerful and very rich. I was wrong. Now I know that you’re happiness for me.”
And at that moment, when I was going to take her in my arms because her eyes had filled with tears, the telephone rang, startling both of us.
The Bad Girl: A Novel Page 30